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Gormenghast (Book 2) and Modern Didacticism
I have finished Gormenghast (i.e. book 2 of the Gormenghast series) and am quite impressed. Below are random reflections and a discussion of why I find myself choosing to read older SF&F vs. recent works. tl;dr: I’m finding recent works, as a generalization, overly didactic. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault in fiction, and spoilers through book 2 of the Gormenghast series.
Random: Sloppiness
I previously compared Peake’s writing to Tolstoy, and now I’m going to compare him to Dostoevsky. Like Dostoevsky, Peake is a sloppy writer; he doesn’t sweat the details. He’s not too concerned with pacing, and in book 2, he’s not too concerned with the passage of time. I suspect him of not keeping track of his characters’ ages; minimally, he doesn’t always give clear markers for them. He’s not bent on tying up all plot threads or having an actual reason for every character to be there.
He’s also not worried about changing premises between books 1 and 2: Gormenghast goes from an underpopulated castle with a handful of nobles and courtiers being served by a surprisingly large number of servants to a township unto itself with enough teachers for an entire boarding school and a large enough number of boys to create an entire educated class of castle residents, though what they’ll do when they grow up, I have no idea. All become teachers?
Random: Ecology
As a setting it doesn’t hold together. There’s no lifecycle, except for the earl’s family, no place all these servants and schoolboys come from. (The surrounding village cannot be that vast, and the boys aren’t peasants). There seems to be no outside traffic, yet there’s so much stuff that there must be some trade.
There’s also plenty of food and even talk of some farming equipment, but no farms or farmers. The only farmer we see is the old man living Beorn-like off the land in book 1.
One could chock this up to the text not being realist, but the ecocritic in me sees this disconnection from material reality as symptomatic of a larger Western mass hallucination that we don’t exist within ecosystems. We see this enacted today in our inability to see that we’re creating rapid biospheric collapse; we see it in our near total lack of awareness of the human rights violations, ecological depredation, and carbon emissions inherent in the massive commodity chains we use to produce almost everything we consume, from soybeans to smart phones. We see it in the bizarre reality that the US Constitution has not a single word to say about anything non-human except that it can be property. The hallucination is on full display here, despite a lot of really beautiful description of landscape.
The sloppiness is okay
Despite all this, I’m impressed by the book because—like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—Peake is an excellent student of human nature. His characters feel plausible and internally consistent, and his observations about their lives and mental states are often far more insightful than many a decently good book. I’m a fan of Dostoevsky, and I’ll take the kind of sloppiness any day.
On Titus, Sexual Assault, and Didacticism (again: trigger warning)
Titus, the series protagonist, is one example of Peake’s skill with characterization. I expected to dislike Titus; this is my default when I get introduced to a character with “this is the hero! Pay attention to him!!” I don’t like hero worship. But Titus surprised me. He is a very well-drawn character, heroic in some respects, yes, but also complex and gray.
And he comes very close to sexually assaulting the feral child called “the Thing.” I want to unpack this.
The Scenario
Over a few years, Titus develops an obsession with this wild unsocialized girl (an outcast from the village), whom he’s spotted in the forest. (FYI, she’s a year younger than he is.) As we are wont to do, he invests meaning in her, seeing her as the symbol for the freedom he wants from his duty as young Earl of Goremghast. He doesn’t know her as a person at all.
Then, when he is seventeen, happenstance places them together in a cave they both seek shelter in during a massive storm. He wakes from sleep to see her there, unaware of him, and watches her for a bit. Out of curiosity, she puts on a wet shirt Titus has laid out to dry. When he reveals himself, she goes into immediate fight-or-flight and tries to escape by climbing the walls to get around him. He purposefully blocks her way, saying things like “I’m a friend,” but she doesn’t understand language, having been ostracized from the village from the time she was very young.
Somewhat tangled up in Titus’s shirt, she miscalculates a leap and falls. Titus catches her and holds onto her, forcing her onto the ground beneath him. (The text explicitly describes his feeling as “lust.”) He is going to kiss her as she lies there, rigid and motionless, but seeing how small and fragile she looks, he feels this desire ebb away. He is then startled by the arrival of his sister and as he relaxes his grip, the Thing escapes, running out into the storm where she gets struck by lightning and dies.
Does the book get that Titus’s behavior messed up?
Yes... but it’s rather understated in its indicators. The biggest indicator is also one of the things Peake does best as a writer: dialogism, which I’m going to gloss as letting each character behave as a person with their own life and motives. The Thing does not welcome his advances. She is certain she’s under threat, and later attack. (She’s not wholly wrong.) She’s just trying to get away from danger. The text is clear about this.
For the rest, though the text uses an omniscient narrator, this scene is in Titus’s point of view. Does Titus understand that this is wrong...? A little? He does back off from kissing her, at least in part because he sees she is young and vulnerable. That’s about it. He never really registers his actions as problematic in any other way.
Even the death of the Thing is not really framed as a sad thing Titus is semi-responsible for: she ran out into a dangerous storm to escape him. Instead, it emphasizes how her sudden obliteration frees him from his fantasy obsession for her; it grows him up, which seems to be all that matters. (Can we say she gets fridged so he can grow up?) His sister, Fuchsia, has no meaningfully commentary on it, which may be in character: she’s depressed and absorbed in her own problems.
And, yes, I do find this all “problematic.” Were I in a critique group with Peake, I might suggest he look for some in-character way to show a bit more awareness of the sheer destructiveness of Titus’s behavior, maybe a pang of conscience?
It’s in character for Titus
However, this is all in character for Titus, and it’s part of why I like him as a character. Titus is classically well written in that his strengths and weaknesses all derive from the same place, the same experiences and personality.
His strengths include:
Bravery, agency, independence, free thinking, love, and passion.
His weaknesses include:
A lot of anger, impulsiveness, self-centeredness, and violence.
These are they’re two sides of the same coin. I believe the passionate, free-thinking Titus would impulsively try to waylay the Thing and end up striking out somewhat violently at her. And since he has grown up as an earl, both put-upon and entitled, in a horrendously misogynistic society*, with no positive female role models but his withdrawn sister, surrounded by oafish male teachers, I completely believe he wouldn’t be able to empathize (much) with the Thing, realize that he is objectifying her, or recognize his own behavior as borderline assault vs. “a young man’s passion.” It’s very plausible.
* Short of polemics like The Handmaid’s Tale, this is one of the most misogynistic fictional worlds I’ve ever encountered. It hammers on Fuchsia’s uselessness to her family as a girl. It is so determined to control women’s sexuality that having sex outside of marriage basically destroys a woman’s (and only a woman’s) life, be she noble or commoner. They despise illegitimacy so much they will not even raise illegitimate children, instead leaving them to fend for themselves from their young childhood under complete ostracism, like the Thing. The entire character of the Doctor’s man-obsessed, spinster sister, Irma, is a case study in how reducing women to nothing but looks, marriageability, and certain fragile pedestaling destroys women’s minds and lives. Oh, and village women are forcibly married off to important (statue) carvers. No wonder Titus has the misogyny bug.
On the whole, I prefer this kind of writing to today’s
Disclaimer: I don’t read a lot of recent SF&F. I’m in a vicious circle of generally not loving what I do read (usually finding myself somewhere between admiring-yet-emotionally-let-down and annoyed), and so not reading much, and so not being very aware of what’s out there. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of gems. The following is just based on what I have read/watched on TV.
As a gross generalization, I find today’s social SF&F pretty didactic, i.e. it’s designed to teach, particularly to uphold values that would create a better world for us in real life: ex. empowering marginalized people, resisting oppression, etc. The values I generally agree with. The didacticism gets old pretty fast. This is not to say there can’t be good didactic stories: a perennial example for me is A Christmas Carol, which is sledgehammer didacticism, supporting some values I disagree with (ex. Dickens is against social safety nets), and yet it’s such a very good, human story.
However, one typical consequence of storytelling that always has to be clear about what the writer and reader should consider “right” is oversimplification. Put another way, a story solely invested in showing one right way cannot, almost by definition, be dialogic. Bakhtin tells us that a fundamental feature of dialogism is that all the characters’ distinct points of view and life experiences cannot be reduced to a single answer; they will sometimes contradict each other in irreconcilable ways.
A few truly great stories manage to present “one right answer” and also be very nuanced in construction of character and exploration of humanity. As mentioned above, I think A Christmas Carol is one; The Lord of the Rings is another. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces may be another. But this is really rare. It’s far more common for this approach to yield a kind of one sidedness, a kind of “we’re right, you’re wrong” that doesn’t go far beyond that. A sort of Aslan-ness (sorry, Lewis: you almost got out of this ramble with no criticism from me at all!).
Somewhat older SF&F (like mid- to late-20th century) is culturally in a different place. And a lot of it is bad or annoying in its own ways. But sometimes it gives me something like “our rather sympathetic hero, Titus, is also almost a rapist, and doesn’t really realize that and is never accountable for it: discuss.” And I like the mental discussion that sort of situation generates. I like that it challenges me to choose how I feel about Titus, how much I can still sympathize with him, how much I want to lecture him—and what this says about how privilege and blindness operate in our real world and what we might do about it beyond the realm of just good guys and bad guys.
The upshot is that I find myself turning to older texts for more challenging content that is not so pointed in telling me how I’m supposed to think.
Note: I’ve steered clear of naming names for the books I’m critiquing because a lot of them (a) are well liked and (b) are well written and do good cultural work. I don’t want to diss specific works that have value and do good.
Random: Sloppiness
I previously compared Peake’s writing to Tolstoy, and now I’m going to compare him to Dostoevsky. Like Dostoevsky, Peake is a sloppy writer; he doesn’t sweat the details. He’s not too concerned with pacing, and in book 2, he’s not too concerned with the passage of time. I suspect him of not keeping track of his characters’ ages; minimally, he doesn’t always give clear markers for them. He’s not bent on tying up all plot threads or having an actual reason for every character to be there.
He’s also not worried about changing premises between books 1 and 2: Gormenghast goes from an underpopulated castle with a handful of nobles and courtiers being served by a surprisingly large number of servants to a township unto itself with enough teachers for an entire boarding school and a large enough number of boys to create an entire educated class of castle residents, though what they’ll do when they grow up, I have no idea. All become teachers?
Random: Ecology
As a setting it doesn’t hold together. There’s no lifecycle, except for the earl’s family, no place all these servants and schoolboys come from. (The surrounding village cannot be that vast, and the boys aren’t peasants). There seems to be no outside traffic, yet there’s so much stuff that there must be some trade.
There’s also plenty of food and even talk of some farming equipment, but no farms or farmers. The only farmer we see is the old man living Beorn-like off the land in book 1.
One could chock this up to the text not being realist, but the ecocritic in me sees this disconnection from material reality as symptomatic of a larger Western mass hallucination that we don’t exist within ecosystems. We see this enacted today in our inability to see that we’re creating rapid biospheric collapse; we see it in our near total lack of awareness of the human rights violations, ecological depredation, and carbon emissions inherent in the massive commodity chains we use to produce almost everything we consume, from soybeans to smart phones. We see it in the bizarre reality that the US Constitution has not a single word to say about anything non-human except that it can be property. The hallucination is on full display here, despite a lot of really beautiful description of landscape.
The sloppiness is okay
Despite all this, I’m impressed by the book because—like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—Peake is an excellent student of human nature. His characters feel plausible and internally consistent, and his observations about their lives and mental states are often far more insightful than many a decently good book. I’m a fan of Dostoevsky, and I’ll take the kind of sloppiness any day.
On Titus, Sexual Assault, and Didacticism (again: trigger warning)
Titus, the series protagonist, is one example of Peake’s skill with characterization. I expected to dislike Titus; this is my default when I get introduced to a character with “this is the hero! Pay attention to him!!” I don’t like hero worship. But Titus surprised me. He is a very well-drawn character, heroic in some respects, yes, but also complex and gray.
And he comes very close to sexually assaulting the feral child called “the Thing.” I want to unpack this.
The Scenario
Over a few years, Titus develops an obsession with this wild unsocialized girl (an outcast from the village), whom he’s spotted in the forest. (FYI, she’s a year younger than he is.) As we are wont to do, he invests meaning in her, seeing her as the symbol for the freedom he wants from his duty as young Earl of Goremghast. He doesn’t know her as a person at all.
Then, when he is seventeen, happenstance places them together in a cave they both seek shelter in during a massive storm. He wakes from sleep to see her there, unaware of him, and watches her for a bit. Out of curiosity, she puts on a wet shirt Titus has laid out to dry. When he reveals himself, she goes into immediate fight-or-flight and tries to escape by climbing the walls to get around him. He purposefully blocks her way, saying things like “I’m a friend,” but she doesn’t understand language, having been ostracized from the village from the time she was very young.
Somewhat tangled up in Titus’s shirt, she miscalculates a leap and falls. Titus catches her and holds onto her, forcing her onto the ground beneath him. (The text explicitly describes his feeling as “lust.”) He is going to kiss her as she lies there, rigid and motionless, but seeing how small and fragile she looks, he feels this desire ebb away. He is then startled by the arrival of his sister and as he relaxes his grip, the Thing escapes, running out into the storm where she gets struck by lightning and dies.
Does the book get that Titus’s behavior messed up?
Yes... but it’s rather understated in its indicators. The biggest indicator is also one of the things Peake does best as a writer: dialogism, which I’m going to gloss as letting each character behave as a person with their own life and motives. The Thing does not welcome his advances. She is certain she’s under threat, and later attack. (She’s not wholly wrong.) She’s just trying to get away from danger. The text is clear about this.
For the rest, though the text uses an omniscient narrator, this scene is in Titus’s point of view. Does Titus understand that this is wrong...? A little? He does back off from kissing her, at least in part because he sees she is young and vulnerable. That’s about it. He never really registers his actions as problematic in any other way.
Even the death of the Thing is not really framed as a sad thing Titus is semi-responsible for: she ran out into a dangerous storm to escape him. Instead, it emphasizes how her sudden obliteration frees him from his fantasy obsession for her; it grows him up, which seems to be all that matters. (Can we say she gets fridged so he can grow up?) His sister, Fuchsia, has no meaningfully commentary on it, which may be in character: she’s depressed and absorbed in her own problems.
And, yes, I do find this all “problematic.” Were I in a critique group with Peake, I might suggest he look for some in-character way to show a bit more awareness of the sheer destructiveness of Titus’s behavior, maybe a pang of conscience?
It’s in character for Titus
However, this is all in character for Titus, and it’s part of why I like him as a character. Titus is classically well written in that his strengths and weaknesses all derive from the same place, the same experiences and personality.
His strengths include:
Bravery, agency, independence, free thinking, love, and passion.
His weaknesses include:
A lot of anger, impulsiveness, self-centeredness, and violence.
These are they’re two sides of the same coin. I believe the passionate, free-thinking Titus would impulsively try to waylay the Thing and end up striking out somewhat violently at her. And since he has grown up as an earl, both put-upon and entitled, in a horrendously misogynistic society*, with no positive female role models but his withdrawn sister, surrounded by oafish male teachers, I completely believe he wouldn’t be able to empathize (much) with the Thing, realize that he is objectifying her, or recognize his own behavior as borderline assault vs. “a young man’s passion.” It’s very plausible.
* Short of polemics like The Handmaid’s Tale, this is one of the most misogynistic fictional worlds I’ve ever encountered. It hammers on Fuchsia’s uselessness to her family as a girl. It is so determined to control women’s sexuality that having sex outside of marriage basically destroys a woman’s (and only a woman’s) life, be she noble or commoner. They despise illegitimacy so much they will not even raise illegitimate children, instead leaving them to fend for themselves from their young childhood under complete ostracism, like the Thing. The entire character of the Doctor’s man-obsessed, spinster sister, Irma, is a case study in how reducing women to nothing but looks, marriageability, and certain fragile pedestaling destroys women’s minds and lives. Oh, and village women are forcibly married off to important (statue) carvers. No wonder Titus has the misogyny bug.
On the whole, I prefer this kind of writing to today’s
Disclaimer: I don’t read a lot of recent SF&F. I’m in a vicious circle of generally not loving what I do read (usually finding myself somewhere between admiring-yet-emotionally-let-down and annoyed), and so not reading much, and so not being very aware of what’s out there. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of gems. The following is just based on what I have read/watched on TV.
As a gross generalization, I find today’s social SF&F pretty didactic, i.e. it’s designed to teach, particularly to uphold values that would create a better world for us in real life: ex. empowering marginalized people, resisting oppression, etc. The values I generally agree with. The didacticism gets old pretty fast. This is not to say there can’t be good didactic stories: a perennial example for me is A Christmas Carol, which is sledgehammer didacticism, supporting some values I disagree with (ex. Dickens is against social safety nets), and yet it’s such a very good, human story.
However, one typical consequence of storytelling that always has to be clear about what the writer and reader should consider “right” is oversimplification. Put another way, a story solely invested in showing one right way cannot, almost by definition, be dialogic. Bakhtin tells us that a fundamental feature of dialogism is that all the characters’ distinct points of view and life experiences cannot be reduced to a single answer; they will sometimes contradict each other in irreconcilable ways.
A few truly great stories manage to present “one right answer” and also be very nuanced in construction of character and exploration of humanity. As mentioned above, I think A Christmas Carol is one; The Lord of the Rings is another. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces may be another. But this is really rare. It’s far more common for this approach to yield a kind of one sidedness, a kind of “we’re right, you’re wrong” that doesn’t go far beyond that. A sort of Aslan-ness (sorry, Lewis: you almost got out of this ramble with no criticism from me at all!).
Somewhat older SF&F (like mid- to late-20th century) is culturally in a different place. And a lot of it is bad or annoying in its own ways. But sometimes it gives me something like “our rather sympathetic hero, Titus, is also almost a rapist, and doesn’t really realize that and is never accountable for it: discuss.” And I like the mental discussion that sort of situation generates. I like that it challenges me to choose how I feel about Titus, how much I can still sympathize with him, how much I want to lecture him—and what this says about how privilege and blindness operate in our real world and what we might do about it beyond the realm of just good guys and bad guys.
The upshot is that I find myself turning to older texts for more challenging content that is not so pointed in telling me how I’m supposed to think.
Note: I’ve steered clear of naming names for the books I’m critiquing because a lot of them (a) are well liked and (b) are well written and do good cultural work. I don’t want to diss specific works that have value and do good.